over a similar thought, and wondering whether men ’might not be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they are over saving their souls.’  The teaching of social duty, the upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true commonwealth—­such would be among the aims of the Church of the future.  Is the hope too fair for realisation?  Is the winning of such beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast?  But surely the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for the one end—­surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative theories which divide.”

How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw myself.  How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same article:—­

“It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways, of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon.  But signs are not awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir men’s breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which thrilled through the veins of the world’s greatest in the past, and woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of the hearts of men.  Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven, nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is crimson with the blood of the

“‘People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.’

...  If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope.”